Stuff You Should Know - How Primitive Will Our Descendants Find Us?

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

It’s all fun and games to think about how backwards and misguided some things people did in the past were until you realize we’ll be “the past” one day. What do we do now that will seem primitive then and how will they be better in the future?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional, networks. The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the noise. I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on musk. Join me, Evan Ratliffe, for On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Theo Henderson,

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Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy, host of the new podcast, Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy. So in this podcast, I'm going to be talking about marriage, divorce, my family, my career. I'm also going to be talking a lot about cancer, the ups and the downs, everything that I've learned from it. It's going to be a wild ride. So listen to Let's Be Clear with Shannon Dordy on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, out there in the Pacific Northwest or with access to an airport or a car rental place that can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the end of January, we'll

see you in Seattle, Portland and San Francisco. That's right, to our new live show for 2024, Seattle Washington, January 24th at the Paramount Theater, then Portland at our homeway from home at Revolution Hall on the 25th, and then winding it all up at Sketchfest on the 26th at the Sydney Goldstein Theater. Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information,

if you want tickets, you can go to a couple of places. You can go to our link tree at link tree slash sysk and you can go to our home on the web stuffyshodo.com. Click on the tour button and it will take you to all of the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets. And we'll see you guys in January. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too and this is Stuff You Should Know, the last edition of the two to the O to the Duce Trey.

Oh is this our final of the year? Trey. Oh, is this our Final of the year it is it's the last one of 2023 Chuck. We we recorded all of the episodes that we're ever going to record in the year 2023 and that amazing. Yeah, and hey, you know since you brought that up. Can I say something? Sure Spotify who carries our show as do all, they have this really cool thing they send out called the RAPWRAP, I guess is in year-end wrap-up kind of thing. And they send us as a show our own statistical analysis, but then they send individual users their own, and we just had a lot of great listeners sending us in,

their rap statistics like, hey, I'm in the top 1% of stuff you should know, listenership. And it's just really neat to see all that stuff coming in. So thank you. It really is. It's amazing. Everybody's so proud of it. It's so great to see.

So no matter what percentage you're in, if you are proud enough to send an email or post it, who does to you? Because we're proud of you right back. if you are proud enough to send an email or post it, who does to you? Because we're proud of you right back. I do think, though, check that we probably should shout out the person who wrote in with the far and away the largest number of listening minutes, according to Spotify. Yeah, who's that?

That is, Aravind Cancerla, who is in the top 0.05% of listeners. And based on the 80,000 plus, 86,772 minutes, I don't see how there could be anybody else in that, you know, in the remaining, what, 0.05% left. Yeah, I did a little back of the envelope math and that's something somewhere between like 25 and 30 hours of stuff you should know a week. Yeah, that just doesn't seem possible. So I have suspicions that this person might have just played it on a loop so they could,

you know, and then just went out shopping or whatever. I don't know. I think Airvind strikes me as a pretty, a pretty straightforward person. So congrats to Airvind. Also, seriously, thank you to everybody who listens to us so much that you get statistics at the end of the year that make you proud. I mean, that's amazing, guys. Thanks very much. Yeah, and thanks to Spotify. That's a cool service that they, or I don't know, is that a service? Whatever. It's a cool thing they do. It's a service. that's a cool service that they are or I don't know is that a service whatever school thing they do. It's a service it's a public service. We were downloaded in 163 countries. I didn't know there were that many countries which is we looked it up it was actually something like 190 so I that's most of the countries. Yeah I would say that's the vast majority of them and by the way everybody knew that

there were more countries than that I was joking. And quickly, I saw that, I don't know if you went through that yet, Josh, but we are third biggest country of growth was Mexico. Oh, no way. And I'm gaming. I'm aiming for a show in Mexico City. I'd like to do that. We just don't know if people would come. So, you know, if we can get like a thousand people in a room in Mexico City. I'd like to do that. We just don't know if like people would come.

So, you know, if we can get like a thousand people in a room in Mexico City, I think that might be a fun thing to do. Yeah, especially if it's a room with seats. Yeah. So we should get at least 500 emails saying at least two people will come and then that means we might go. All right. So anyway, should we get on with barberry practices? Yeah, let's because I find this endlessly fascinating. Olivia helped us with this. And basically what we're doing here is reversing what we already kind of like to do, smugly, which is look back 50, 100, 200 years and be like, look at how backwards and antiquated those people were back then. Like even as recently as the 90s, I remember in the mid 90s,

I was, I smoked on an airplane on the way to Amsterdam. Yeah. And like, there was, it was just like the last three rows were smoking, but it's not like it was sectioned off. There wasn't even a curtain. It's just like like this is the smoking section, even though the entire plane's being covered in your cigarette smoke. This was the 90s man. Yeah. The first time I flew to Europe, there was smoking. And like that was it would have been 96.

Yeah. I mean, imagine that today, I mean, you would literally go to federal prison if you tried to lay to cigarette on an airplane today. Right. You know? Yeah, I mean, it's about the fire, but sure. Yeah, a few decades before that, there was Jello salad,

where it was all the rage, and like the weirdest Jello salad, if you've never just kind of taken a strolled-up memory lane and looked up like pictures of Jello molds from the 50s to the 70s. Treat yourself and go do that. But make sure you have not had lunch yet because you're going to want to gag when you see a lot of them. That's another fun thing to judge people for being stupid with jello.

Because I don't know if we said it yet. We're going to do the opposite of that. We're going to look forward and try to figure out what our descendants are going to ridicule us or look down at us about. What will we seem primitive or barbaric or ridiculous about? That's right, but what we have before us are seven, I think, a little more serious things than Jello molds. And spanking kids is on up there. However, it really depends on who you ask because about half of Americans still think and this is a quote and this from a survey a couple of years ago

from the American family survey. Quote, it is sometimes necessary to discipline a child with a good hard spanking. And half of those respondents said almost under their breath, feel so right. Yeah, I mean, big change from, you know, back in the day, they have another stat from 68 when 94% of parents said, yeah, hit your kids. It's awesome. That's a big drop. But things are really changing because a third of the respondents between 18 and 29 agree with spanking compared to 50% of the overall survey.

So it's something that's going out of fashion for sure. Yeah, it seems to be following a larger trend of moving away from social acceptance of violence in any form. And it's being supported by studies that find like, yeah, it's actually good if you don't spank your kids because not only has there never been a study that shows it improves children's behavior, the study after study keeps suggesting it does the opposite.

It actually malagests children. I mean, I can't imagine what a well-adjusted person I would be if I hadn't been spanked that handful of times when I was a kid. Yeah, you know, I was, we're always trying to poke around to find, you know, the other opinion on something just to take a look at it.

And, you know, there are people who don't agree. I saw this one professor from the Oklahoma state, Robert Larr-Zellie. I can't even read him on handwriting now. But he said the studies that are out there are flawed for a couple of reasons. One, he says, these studies that say that if you spank kids more, that leads to them actually acting out more. He's saying, no, kids, it's the kids that are acting out more that are, it's a chicken and the egg thing.

Yes, I've seen that. Those are the ones getting spanked more. I've seen that. And I think I found in a scientific American article, there was at least one group that managed to control for that. And basically have shown like, no, it actually does have this effect on kids. The problem that, what'd you say, Laraselli? I think so if my writing is any indicator.

That what Laraselli's saying is that these studies don't, they don't start following kids. Right. And from birth to 25 or 30. And then see where you spanked, where you not spanked. It's all just like they might, they might peek in on a kid who's in the, at the spanking age. Yeah.

And look at their behavior then and you just can't parse it apart. So there's not really good quality studies, but I saw it put like this, even if there are no studies that conclusively show spanking is bad for kids or produces malajuss to behavior in kids, there are plenty of studies that seem to suggest that. There aren't any studies that seem to suggest otherwise that it's actually good, it's effective to spank your kids. And so the argument that I've seen is like why why do it then? Yeah, I saw a first of all, I'm a parent I can't in a million years imagine hitting Ruby for any reason that's nice It makes me want to cry just thinking about that. It's terrible

for our family. But I did find a study from 2018 that I found in, from NPR, they didn't do the study, but they were, you know, did a thing on it. I'm sure they were hot and heavy on it. Of course. It was, what they claim, and it seems like probably one of the most robust studies,

at least that looks at countries that have banned spanking because I Think something like 62 countries have banned spanking Starting with Sweden in 1979. Did you even know there are that many countries? But they followed four or they they use 400,000 children from kids from 88 countries. So that's pretty good. 58 countries have the bands in 30 don't. I'm not sure which one it is, but what they found when, what they were tracking was incidences of kids fighting, like, you know, getting in fights at school.

And in the countries that have banned spanking uh... there was a school fighting reduction by 69% in boys 42% in girls. Wow, which is I mean that is pretty substantial I was curious about the United States because you know we both grew up like my dad was my elementary school principal And they were he spanked me another kids It's ridiculous to think about But apparently in 77 the Supreme Court of the United States gave the power to the states These days 90% of schools don't use corporal punishment, but it is still legal in 17 states there are restrictions in place and a lot of those like maybe your parents have to sign a

thing that said, sure, hit my kid. But 17% of states you can still do this with Mississippi leading the way in the most spankings. And the other thing I found out that we should point out is that is that black males are twice as likely to be spanked than anyone and get this 16.5% of kids that are corporately punished in schools in America today are disabled. Oh my god. Usually it's an intellectual disability. Is that not disturbing? Yeah, of course it's disturbing. disability. Wow. Is that not disturbing? Yeah, of course it's disturbing. That's horrible. That's one of the most horrible statistics you've ever spouted out.

And I should say also just want to verify for the listeners in any of those 62 countries where spanking is banned. You're talking about public spanking, like in school, in 17 states, in schools you're allowed to do that right? Yes, a teacher or a principal and they say it's you know and this is one of the other problems that that professor had is that the studies he says lump everyone in together as in like

the parents who do it as the very last resort after several other attempts at discipline or parents are just like, oh, you screwed up. Let's hit you or whatever. And apparently most, almost all the schools, it is a last resort as in they've tried other things, but it's just, I don't know. I try not to judge people, but don't hit your kids. Well, I was going to, it's legal in 17 states for schools to spank kids.

It's legal in all 50 states for a parent to spank kids. That's, there's not really anything coming down the horizon. That makes it seem like that's ever gonna be banned. But it does seem generationally like we're moving away from spanking pretty rapidly. Yeah. My spankings as a kid were very infrequent and very organized as in it was never done in the heat of anger, like just getting slapped or something.

It was like, all right, go to the bathroom and spend 10 minutes, you know, upset and scared. And then I got spanked with a Bolo paddle, you know the little Bolo paddle games. I know the Bolo tie. No, the Bolo paddle was where you, a little light plywood paddle with a ball. I remember band. Yeah, sure. That was the spanking device in my heart.

Does things are made of like balsa wood? Yeah, it wasn't too bad, it's stung, but you know. How about all of your spankings that go, a grownup? That's usually in Bob's leather. Okay. You want to move on to the next one? Yeah, let's let's move on to chemotherapy. Okay, so chemotherapy is one of these things where if you start kind of putting it down today, what you're talking about is our current modern medical miracle that since the 90s has reduced the

cancer death rate by 25%. It's a really big deal that we have chemotherapy now. It's saved a lot of lives. Yeah, this is not poo pooing chemotherapy. No, it's not. The reason why we can probably guess that our descendants down the line are going to look at chemotherapy as fairly primitive and barbaric is because it's so indiscriminate in how it harms the body. It harms the whole body in order to kill the cancer

cells, right? And we're moving it seems like much more toward far far more specific and tailored medicine. And so all of the side effects and the whorliness that come with chemotherapy, even though it does save lives, will be going away in future decades it looks like. Yeah, and it seems like, and we're going to talk about a few ways that things are becoming more specific, but that seems to be the way it's all trying to go is instead of just like killing all the cells, let's see if they can just specifically target cancer cells and then eventually get down to the human specific targeting of things, which would be amazing obviously, patient

specific. But one of the first ones is antibody drug conjugates and This is a type of chemotherapy, but it combines chemotherapy like the drugs used in chemotherapy with monoclonal antibodies, which are you know Lab just like antibodies that we have in our body except they're created in a lab Right, and so what happens is we inject these drugs these antibody drug conjugates into a patient with cancer and those antibodies are designed to go seek out the tumor, the specific kind

of tumor that that patient has, and attach to that tumor that cancer cell. And it delivers that payload of chemo drugs to it. It says here, you go here, it's a nice little present and it turns around and runs and then pfff in the background that the cell explodes and the antibody ends up on its chest but lives to fight another day. Yeah, exactly. That's a chrr. If we're ahead in that direction, that's fantastic.

Yeah. Vaccines is another one. The MRNA vaccines that we detailed back when those came out for COVID, two of the most successful versions of those vaccines were originally brought about to begin with as tumor vaccines. And the idea is to use sort of that same technology to just specifically target tumors themselves. So it's not like a vaccine to prevent a disease. It's a shot that will essentially specifically shrink a tumor. Yeah, just like the mRNA vaccines for COVID trained the body to look for and respond to COVID viruses saying like, hey, if you see anything with this little horn on it, the spike go after it.

They're doing the same thing with tumors, right? So that's boosting the immune response. It's also training the immune response. So technically it does qualify as a vaccine. And because like we talked about in the COVID vaccine episode, this mRNA technology is just so you can just, it's just like ready to wear vaccines basically. Yeah, apparently, yeah, apparently they have reached a turning point and in the next five years, a lot of cancer researchers

are saying we're going to see a lot more cancer vaccines coming down the pike. Amazing. And then what I talked about earlier, like targeting cancer cells specifically is like a great direction to go, but really getting into personalized cancer care will be the next step beyond that. Like, hey, I'm going to identify exactly what kind of tumor that you have in your body, and not just maybe this kind of tumor. And, you know, treat treat, like get to patient-specific levels of treatment.

And I know we have poopued AI in certain respects, but this is a place where AI can really probably do a lot of good. Yeah, I think we should just clarify our position on it if I can speak for both of us. Sure. As long as AI is not taking over the world or damaging humanity in some terrible way, I am all for all of the great ways it can help things. And this

is a really sternly example of that. Yeah. It gave us a new Beatles song. Yeah. I would say that's right in the middle for me. But the, I think what you were talking about was taking a sample of the specific tumor that a specific person has, analyzing its genetic makeup and then looking at that genetic makeup, thanks to AI spitting out all of the information that we need from analyzing that huge genome, saying, oh, this is a in Achilles heel, this is another weakness, this is another way we can attack it. And then tailoring the treatment for that specific tumor, like that tumor, like you said, not that kind of tumor, that tumor is getting attacked.

It's so specific, you could name the tumor, name the tumor Melvin. Melvin is toast when you're using precision or personal, um, cancer treatments. Yeah. And, you know, this kind of stuff could even be possible. When you're using precision or personal cancer treatments? Yeah. You know, this kind of stuff could even be possible now. It's just really, really expensive to target a specific tumor for a specific human. And so the idea is hopefully with the help of AI, they can just reduce a lot of the cost basically for doing that.

So it becomes instead of something that's not even, you know, not even something worth pursuing or are able to be pursued because of finances. Something that's like, oh yeah, just step right up and we'll spit out your treatment. Yeah, and as more, more, this is the cost come down, more people use it, which means more people using it allows for greater, greater chance of new breakthrough. So yeah, hopefully, we're going to have cancer licked in the future. I saw somebody suggest that it'll end up being kind of like a chronic disease akin to diabetes in the future.

Just something you can live fairly, healthily with. Yeah, you can manage and there'll be plenty of drugs to keep you going. Amazing. You want to take a break? Yeah. Okay. Well, then let's do that. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a

world-changing figure. That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also sowed chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground. Just choose them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars,

done and excused being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Theo Henderson, Austin creator of the podcast called William House. My lived experience in houselessness is extensive.

I was one of over 75,000 experiencing houselessness on a given night in Los Angeles. Here's a simple truth. Houselessness is everywhere. It affects over half a billion people in the United States alone. William House will explore the senseless tragedy of displacement from the perspective of the unhouse. On my podcast, we're going to cover far more than my story. We're going to debunk the myths around house systems.

We're going to remember and humanize the community who have passed by spotlighting house systems remembrance day. More importantly, we're going to look at ways we criminalize the unhouse. Because if you can demonize them, you can criminalize them. Unlike the mainstream media's way of speaking over at the unhoused my podcast centers their voices in the conversation houses list is not a monolith listen to we can house an i heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast

Hi guys Nancy Grace here host of crime stories with Nancy Grace. I have dedicated my life to fighting crime and helping crime victims and their families, investigating literally thousands of cases. First, as a special prosecutor in the Atlanta Fulton County District Attorney's Office. And now, our podcast brings you the very latest crime stories from across our great country, the University of Idaho murders, the Alex Murdoch family murders, missing moms Suzanne Morpheu, her remains just found. Crystal Rogers, mom of five, gone, and so many more. Crime stories is the only daily podcast bringing listeners the latest breaking crime and justice news every day.

Another chance to help crime victims and bring criminals to justice. Listen to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the Hit Podcast Family Secrets. What happens when the person you idolize, the person you think you know best, turns out to be someone else entirely. And in a world where everyone is trying to fix themselves,

fix their minds, fix their bodies, what does it look like when we settle into the reality of what it might mean to be unfixed? And what if you were kidnapped by your own grandparents and left with an endless well of mysteries about yourself and those around you? These are just a few extraordinary puzzles we'll be exploring in our ninth season of Family Secrets.

With over 32 million downloads and nearly 100 unique stories in our feed, we continue to be in awe of our guests, whose stories of courage and tenacity about breaking through the walls of secrecy never fail to amaze. I hope you'll join me and my astonishing guests for this new season of Family Secrets. On the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you'll get your podcasts. All right, next up on the list of things that people may one day look back and say, why did you do it that way? Dummies of the 21st century is organ transplants.

We have a pretty great episode on organ transplants somewhere in our back catalog. It feels like a long time ago. It was a little while. But what we're basically talking about, and again, organ transplants, awesome. It's amazing how far they've come in the past, since they've been doing them, but rejection rates are still an issue, up to 10% to 15% for kidneys, for instance.

And then also the fact that transporting organs, getting them to the people in time can still be an issue. 17 Americans die every day waiting on organs. And it's also inequitable in that generally people that have the most funded get the most organs for transplant. But there's a better way forward, right? Yeah, I just want to say one, I found a stat that I found rather shocking.

One in five donated kidneys goes unused. It goes to waste. Even though people die waiting for kidneys, that's just how clujee the whole setup is right now. Yeah. So yeah, they're trying to fix the process and the system and the organization and charge of that in the United States.

But further down the pike on a longer timeline, the goal is organicinesis, which is what it sounds like. It's creating entirely new organs from cells, from scratch. Just like, watch this grow. You remember those little dinosaur sponges that you added water to and they just grew, grew, grew? It's kind of like that, but with fully functioning organs. Yeah, how far are we away from someone

trying to grow a human out in a lab? I'm sure somebody's probably trying it already, but I don't know how long it'll be till they're successful. I mean, we had Dolly the sheep. That was Dolly was a clone, right? Yes. And I don't know if everybody's read our book, and if you haven't, I'll just go ahead and share with you a little fact from it. Yeah, passage of dramatic reading. Apparently Dolly was named Dolly because she was grown from a mammary cell.

So it was a 90s, ha ha joke about Dolly Parton. Yeah. I think we might have said that in the Dolly Parton episode. Didn't we hear it? Oh, if we did, I'll have to go back and listen if so, we'll edit this part out. No, no, no, it bears repeating, I think. Okay, so yes, we're a little ways off

because not only Chuck, are we not capable of growing human from cells, we're not capable of growing kidneys or hearts, but we are somewhere, we've grown and successfully transplanted, um, wind pipes, bladders, fairly like simple organs and structures, but I mean, simple is like a relative term because we're talking about something that was grown from that person's own cells into the very like piece of equipment that they needed and then put in them and it worked.

Yeah, which is remarkable. I know that they can do this with, at least right now, the epidermis. So if you're a burn victim, you can get your own stem cells and you can get some new epidermis, those about to say just skin, but they're working on growing like the entire thickness of the skin. They're not there yet. But they can now grow epidermis from your own stem cells in a lab and they transfer it

to something called Fiberin, which is a protein that really kind of helps your blood clot when you get a cut or something. And then they put it on your body and it just, it goes, and then you're done. Yeah, it makes that sound. It takes, you know, obviously it's a process. I was just kidding around. But right now they can't like grow skin that grows hair or sebaceous glands and stuff like

that. But if you're a burn victim, and you can get your own epidermis to replace your scarred skin on your body, then that's pretty amazing. It's kind of a kind of a laying sod, but with skin, you know? Sure. So, right now, I think the state of the art with organ and genesis, that extra, oh, trips me up. And I like to add syllables. So that's a real tricky one.

Is growing organs in other animals. And as we'll see, hopefully, we're going to be moving away from that because to take that organ from that animal and transplant it into a human, you kill that animal in the process, right? Like you don't, you can't take a pig's heart and be like, good luck with the rest of your life because it doesn't have a rest of its life. It's missing its heart. And from a lot of the trends that I've seen, it seems like a fairly safe bet that we're moving in a direction where animal welfare is going to become more and more and more important to where how we treat animals will be maybe the most critical thing that people

of the future will look back at us on, you know? Yeah, which that's coming up in a more robust way in a second. But to finish this up, there's also 3D Bio-Printing, which is pretty amazing. I remember telling the story one time. I've known two people in my life who were born without an external ear and the process back then was they formed a sort of a skeleton of the shape of an ear. And I'm not sure what it was made of, I think cartilage, but if I'm not mistaken, that

then was like a skin bubble around it and then they would suck the air out of that skin bubble very quickly to onto that cartilage to form what looked close enough to an external ear, NSA external, like the ear parts are. Yeah, I know it's a trauma. And I've known two people in my life that had that done and they, you know, back in the day, it was not like it is now.

I think the 3D bio-printing of ears is much, much further along and they look much better than they used to, and that's kind of the point. Right. But they're thinking that, you know, maybe one day we can 3D bio-print a liver. Yeah, pretty amazing. And that'll kind of come up in well in the next section too So I say we move on to the next section because it does kind of tie into what we were talking about just now That's right. Let's do it

So getting meat from animals is probably something that will really be looked down upon in the future because we already have techniques that will because we already have techniques that make it so we don't really need live animals to create meat, to eat meat. And yet we're still eating meat. And that's despite, and I'm very much guilty of this too, that's despite knowing how horrific and terrible factory farming is for the animals themselves, for the environment. People just really love meat and it's tough to give up. So rather than forcing people to give up, there's other alternatives that people are working on to replace it. We're going to need to do that too because apparently Chuck, the growing

demand for meat is going to be totally unsustainable in the next couple decades. Yeah, I mean there are statistics like the UN will throw out that say we're going to, by the year 2050, the meat demand means we're going to have to produce 50 to 100% more meat than we do now. But there's also other people saying like, hey, this whole notion of, you know, wealthier countries eat meat because they can afford it. in countries that are more developing, eat agriculturally, largely or vegetarian, because they're forced to. Isn't really the case, or at least moving forward, it looks like, because what they found is the emerging trend is that people are eating less meat once they get enough wealth to

afford it for a bunch of reasons. And one of which is what you're talking about is there's just a forever changing way that humans look at animals and animal welfare for one, and also, you know, red meat in the fact that it's terrible for your body is another one. And terrible for the environment, livestock raising that includes transportation, tractor emissions, but also methane from the cow's shooting ducks all the time, that accounts for 14 and a half percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. So it has like this triple impact, triple negative impact on the animals welfare, the human

body, and the health of the earth. And for those reasons, it does seem like people in wealthier countries are starting to move away from meat. And so I think the organization for economic cooperation and development, they released an agricultural outlook within the last couple of years, and they predicted that around 2075, the whole world will start moving away from meat. And that eventually we're just going to stop eating what's called carcass meat, very appropriately, altogether.

Yeah. Can I tell you something really quick about a Instagram video I saw today? Yeah. It has to do with the cows and the methane. Actually our colleague, our old friend, Tameca, that worked posted this. Yeah.

And it was a video of a guy that was, showed how they treat bloat and cows. Have you seen this? No When a cow gets bloated with gas, they stick a needle into the cow's stomach, releasing methane, and they light that thing so they can see a flame to judge like how much gas is still in there. Oh well. So there was a video of a cow with a with a bloat is still in there. Oh, wow. So there was a video of a cow with a blowtorch coming out of its side, essentially.

Wow. What was the cow's expression like? Well, I saw it as a cow, but the guy who was hosting the video, his expression was horrified because he was like, you know, can you believe that this is where we are in the world? Yeah. I totally can believe that. That doesn't surprise me at all to tell you the truth. And they're trying to help the cow, but it's, you know, the cows, the reason the cow's there is because of factory farming.

Right. Uh, Tomeco, by the way, has one of the better, um, non-celebrity Instagram feeds you can find. Yeah, Tomeco. This is great. It's good stuff. But what you were saying about moving away from, what'd you call it, carcass meat?

Yeah. There are two main ways that that's happening right now, and that is obviously what they call novel vegan meat replacements, fake meat, impossible stuff, beyond stuff, and then lab-grown meat, which, did we do a whole episode on lab-grown meat? Yeah, we did, a while back. Not thought so. We should update it.

We did the recycling episode. You know, like so much stuff has changed since total. I'm sure. We'll update it eventually, but lab-grown meat or cultured meat is exactly what it sounds like. You use a bio-reactor, sometimes a 3D, like bio-printer, using animal cells to recreate meat. And they, I think, there's a consulting group called ATKERNI. They predict that by 2040, which is not that long off everybody,

up to 60% of global meat consumption will be from cultured or non-vegan meat replacements. Like, that's significant. That's a huge change. Like, there may be countries that are developing now that won't even eat carcass meat when they become wealthy because the replacements will become so great. There'll be no reason to eat meat. Yeah. You know, if you ask the CEOs of beyond it and possible,

they're gonna say in 15 years, there will be no more eating of meat. That's a little ambitious and I think that you know maybe they're trying to drive up the stock price. So that's probably not going to be the case but that that ATKERNI group prediction like that's that seems quite possible. I buy that especially if there's a couple of challenges that are overcome by then, which is, you know, that's 17, sorry, 16 years now away. And that's plenty of time to overcome some relative speed bumps. One is replicating. No, I think they have flavor kind of licked at least as far as cultured meat goes. Yeah, texture. Texture's the problem, because you don't want to eat like a little scoby of beef that tastes

just like beef, but looks like a scoby from a kombucha batch. No one wants to eat that. And yet, Japanese researchers recently showed, I think, according to FreeThink, this great website I found, in 2021, they recreated a waegu steak, which has got some of the most complex marbling of fat mixed in with the meat that you could possibly ever come across, and they faithfully recreated one. I'm sure it costs them a million and a half dollars to make that one steak, but there was a proof of concept

that it can be done. The other big challenge is right now when you're making that wagyu steak from cellular culture, you actually need to take it from an unborn calf as you slaughter the mom. I don't think the mom has to be slaughtered. I think they just take it while they're slaughtering the mom. And that's what they use to grow meat right now. And a lot of people are like, no, still,

I'm not okay with that. It's still an animal suffers somehow some way. And so there's a company called meatable, a Dutch company that said, we got this, we got our way around this. Yeah, they made a sausage in July 2022 that was lab-grown sausage, lab-grown pork, but it did not use, I don't think we said what it's called, fetal bovine serum, is that blood drawn from the cow's fetus, and that's what you said it's typically used, but they didn't use that at all. There was no animal involved. Yeah, they used cells from like a live animal

that was unharmed by it. Well, yeah, that's what I meant. No animal involved is in, their death was not involved. Right, right, exactly. Yeah, the animal couldn't have cared less either way from what I understand. They just, they were in the process of having, they were being degassed, so they had bigger fish

to fry than somebody scraping a few cells off their high encorters, you know. It's like I got a blowtorch coming out of my mind. Exactly. Okay, I say we move on. Oh, but first Chuck, let's take a break because it's, it's that kind of time. Let's do it. When Walter Isaacson set out to write his biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure.

That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. What he got was a subject who also soared chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And when I sat down with Isaacs in five weeks ago, he told me how he captured it all. They had Kansas spray paint and they're just putting big axes on machines and it's almost like kids playing on the playground, just choose them up left, right, and center.

And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he doesn't even remember it, getting the bars, done, excuse being a total f***. But I want the reader to see it in action. My name is Evan Ratliffe and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Join us in this four-part series as Isaacson breaks down how he captured a vivid portrait of a polarizing genius. Listen to On Musk on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Theo Henderson, Austin creator of the podcast called William House. My lived experience in houselessness is extensive. I was one of over 75,000 experiencing houselessness on a given night in Los Angeles. Here's a simple truth. Houselessness is everywhere. It affects over half a billion people in the United States alone.

Weezy and House will explore the senseless tragedy of displacement from the perspective of the unhoused. On my podcast, we're going to cover far more than my story. We're going to debunk the myths around house assistance. We're going to remember and humanize the community who have passed by spotlighting house assistance remembrance day. More importantly, we're going to look at ways we criminalize the unhoused. Because if you can demonize him, you can criminalize him. Unlike the mainstream media's way of speaking over the unhoused, my podcast centers their voices

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you get your podcast. In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Roboc and TJ Holmes, a renowned broadcasting team, with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide are sharing their voices and Perspectives in a way you've never heard before they explore meaningful conversations about current events pop culture and Everything in between nothing is off limits This was a scandal that wasn't yeah, and this was not What you've been sold. The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed

to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robock and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines. This is the first time that we actually get to say, what happened and where we are today. Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back, Charles. We're talking about what people in the future are going to

think of us based on the stuff we do today that may seem primitive. And one of them might not seem, well, it could seem primitive. It will seem quaint probably is driving a car yourself. Or maybe even owning your own car. because the predictions for the future are that car hailing apps will become so ubiquitous that you're gonna need your own car less and less and less. This is a prediction from Cara Schrisser, Swisher, the New York Times tech call in this, sorry Cara, that not too many years, owning your own car is going to become obsolete.

And then eventually the next step, this is me adding to that prediction, those cars that pick you up when you use a ride hailing app will not have a driver in them. You will just stand in the back and go. Yeah, I mean self-driving cars has been in the news a lot over the past decade or so. I remember being in San Francisco a couple of years ago

and seeing a car with a crazy contraption on top. And I was like, what in the world is that? And is that a Google maps or Google Earth like thing taking pictures? That car's wearing braces. And I looked inside, I was like, no, no, no. There's no human in that car. And it kind of startled me, but you show which craft.

I did. I do a Molotov cocktail. I don't care that problem. But there was a company. I think there were, you know, there's more than one company that's trying this stuff out. But there's a company called Cruz, which just recently in October of this year, or I guess last year now, of 2023, the California state government said, you can't do this, you can't practice this anymore.

No more driverless practicing out of you because, well, for a lot of reasons, building up to what was called the incident. But minor incidents involve things like blocking ambulances, stopping in the middle of an intersection, re-raining a bus, running red lights, stuff like that. But the big incident was when a pedestrian finally was bound to happen, was hit in downtown San Francisco

when she was hit by another car driven by real human knocked into the other lane and then the cruise car apparently break but then rolled over her anyway pulled her forward and then stopped on top of her. Just stopped. It was like, okay, I don't know what to do. I'm just going to freeze right here on top of this pedestrian. So yeah, cruise is far and away, the only company from having problems with their tech that they're working on, they're just the most recent

poster child of the problems with self-driving cars. Yeah, she didn't die by the way. No, thank you for saying that. Yeah. The point of this is though is that despite these setbacks, we exist in the time of setbacks. In a couple of decadesbacks, we exist in the time of setbacks. In a couple of decades, we'll exist in the time where we're beyond those setbacks and we have driverless cars. These setbacks don't mean that we're never going to have driverless cars. In fact, even people who are super skeptical of them right now still admit, we're probably going to have them at some point in the future.

It's just a question of when. And it seems like we're a little further behind than we may have thought a few years ago. Yeah, and you know, one thing that if it's not, I think the road there may not be as abrupt because we already see in newer cars, a lot of like things like lane assistance, like your car will correct itself and steer itself back if it sees that it's driving off the road. Like if you're drowsy or you're on your phone, which you should never be. So you see lane assistance and stuff like that.

If your speed really, really changes a lot, a lot of times cars these days will send you an alert. This is like, are you okay? Maybe you should pull over. Stuff like that. So that's sort of like, these are the intermediary steps that will lead to full automation, and they've already come a long way. But apparently, again, with the help of AI, they could go a lot further. Yeah, eventually the cars is going to start talking to itself, and you'll feel so left out. You just don't even get in the driver's seat anymore. But the whole point of removing humans from cars is to remove humans from the equation of driving. Not for our convenience necessarily, but for our safety,

because we're our own worst enemies when it comes to driving. You found a stat that recently, it was it like 2020, 2021, do you know? It's 2021, but just over the last few years in general, it's been about 30 to 33% of fatalities involved at least one of the drivers being drunk. I couldn't find any statistics that also include drugs, but just being drunk alone, 30% of people who die in the United States die because one of the people involved in that crash was drunk. That is unacceptable, but it's humans. People do that. It's a terrible decision. People think that that's not going to happen to them and it does, and it accounts for thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths every year. Driverless cars don't drink. They have other problems right now, but as we work them out, those problems will become

a part of the past and drunk driving accidents will become a part of the past as well, which will be great for everybody. Yeah, I mean, 94% of any accident in the United States involves some kind of human error. So what I'm curious about is what, what the acceptable percentage of driverless car error because it seems like, it seems like human car error is just endlessly forgivable to the point where, you know, like every car these days,

you shouldn't be able to start unless you can blow into a breathalyzer. Like that technology is there. Yeah, we're harder on computers than we are in ourselves is what you're saying, huh? Well, exactly. So like what if all of a sudden driverless cars, they prove like, you know, they can reduce total accidents by 90%. There would still be people saying like, in those 10% of cases where someone died, it

was some AI computer or whatever. So it's just, I don't know, just find it really interesting that we still allow people to get into a car after they've been drinking and drive even though the technology exists to stop that from happening. Well, yeah, I think that it's a cognitive bias of ours. We tend to focus on the more sensational and the more sensational is a car being driven by a computer killing somebody, than a drunk dude killing somebody in his car. Yeah.

So yeah, just removing people from the equation should increase safety. It should also probably increase, or decrease pollution as a result. There's somebody who came up with the eye popping statistic that 30% of the traffic in metropolitan areas is people circling the block looking for a place to park. If you don't own a car and you're not driving your own car, that goes away.

So 30% of traffic goes away instantaneously with that. Yeah. I mean, you had me right there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean that you had me right there. Yeah Yeah, so driverless cars almost certainly coming down the pike as long as AI doesn't take over the world Of course, I think we should caveat this entire episode with that all of this is going to happen if AI doesn't take over the world Okay, that's right and we're gonna finish up with a couple of shorter ones that I think you're just Pretty awesome and interesting.

One is the fact that sort of the current thinking is that we tend to tie progress as a nation, definitely in the United States, but in most places around the world, to how robust an economy is. It's always tied to finances on what kind of progress we're making. And there are people that think, like sort of like with the way we're starting to look at animals,

like one day that's not gonna be the most important factor for humans, and things like the health of the earth, and human beings, health and well-being, both physically and mentally, is is the you should equate that with the success of a nation and one day they're gonna look back and say remember when we all that we cared about was the fact that the stock market was flush. Yeah, because we gdp just tells you whether an economy is growing or shrinking, right? That's basically all it tells you.

And it leaves out a lot of stuff. Like you said, human well-being, things like whether people are dying of deaths of despair or whether they're generally happy, how many resources are being depleted as anybody working on an alternative that, all of the stuff that creates that growing economy just is totally ignored. And I think that's what that economist Kate Rayworth was saying is like it's madness. It's so ridiculous to just completely not count all of this stuff that really, really counts in favor of just this one metric, which is growth or shrinkage. And not only is that probably going to be,

you know, thought of as ridiculous in the future, people, younger people today who are becoming adults or who have recently become adults, they already tend to think this way as a group. So it's pretty sure indicator that we're going to leave GDP or growth behind as an indicator of the health of an economy and start thinking more about the other stuff, the more important stuff. And who knows what can result from that? Like what great cascading knock on effects that that

will have? Yeah, you found this Princeton University, bioethicist named Peter Singer, who talked about the fact that the circle of concern as human kind advances is expanding. And that's just a wonderful thought. And you see it in everything from the fact that, we've laughed before it like the madman episode where people used to just willingly throw litter

on the ground. To, you know, we look back at that as barbaric generally. And that's just one small example. So as humans are evolving down the line, that circle of concern is expanding and people are caring about more and more things that they didn't care about before. And that's great.

Yeah, and Peter Singer, by the way, is very famous ethicist as far as animal rights are concerned in animal welfare. So yeah, his whole thing is like, we're going to stop focusing on conspicuous consumption. And rather, you'll be more considered like a great person, not from your wealth, but from your charity and your charitable giving, which would be great. And then that circle of concern kind of leads us to our last one too, because the most recent inclusion into the circle of concern is the environment, the earth, the health of the earth. And this one is just a sure give me.

There is no way that we're not going to be looked down upon for this by our descendents, and that is burning fossil fuels. Yeah, I mean, in 500 years, who knows, maybe sooner, it seems like people will definitely look back and say, I can't believe that we used to burn fossil fuels like we did. And for a lot of reasons, not just the process of removing fossil fuels and all that goes into that, or even the climate in the ozone, which are all huge concerns, obviously. But just things like pollution and air quality, and the fact that that kills people and that cost so much money in health care, I think there was a study from the University of Wisconsin in Madison that said if we stopped

burning fossil fuels altogether, it would eliminate about 50,000 premature deaths per year because of air quality alone and about $600 billion annually in the U.S. alone in health care costs. Yeah, and I think even more than looking at us as like dumb, dumb, for ignoring that, we're going to be looked at as kind of reviled because of the future we'll have delivered our descendants because of the climate change we just allowed to happen.

Yeah. I saw a who estimate that 250,000 additional deaths per year are expected to come each year between 20, 30 and 2050 because of climate change from things like heat stress, malnutrition, insect-borne diseases, an additional quarter of a million people are going to die every year because of climate change starting six years from now. That's nuts. So I can only imagine what the people of 2100

are going to think of us. Hopefully they'll have everything under control by then, but they're probably going to be pretty ticked off that they had to go to the trouble. Yeah. I mean, you can see this coming because it already happens now. Once again, by seeing younger generations already looking at previous generations as barbaric. And how we treat the earth.

For sure, I saw an RHS financial estimate or prediction that the oil market will collapse this decade that we're just based on trends, current trends now, and the way people think now that probably we won't be using oil nearly as much in the next 10-20 years. You're interesting. Yeah. The future is interesting, Chuck. And it is the future, as a matter of fact, it's almost 2024. And I just want to say happy New Year to everybody, huh?

Uh, that's right. Happy New Year, everyone. We thank you once again for your support. We say it all the time. If there was no you, there would be no us. We are always grateful that we are allowed to do this job because you listen. Yeah, thank you and happy new year to everyone.

Happy birthday to you, me. And happy birthday. Thanks, Chuck. And we'll see you guys next year. And if you want to get in touch with us in the interim, in this very short time left in 2023, you can do a via email almost instantaneously.

Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, put a sash on it that says 2024 and send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRad Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Walter Isaacson set out to write about a world-changing genius in Elon Musk and found a man addicted to chaos and conspiracy. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social, emotional networks. The book launched a thousand hot takes, so I sat down with Isaacson to try to get past the

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